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Immigration and Animal Shelters?

No matter what the issue, here in Southern California, there is always an immigration angle to be found. As a case in point, allow me to present the following transcription of a voice mail I received this morning from a self-described animal “rescuer” who was none too happy about today’s Daily News editorial on the efficacy of “no-kill” rules at L.A. animal shelters:

“The overcrowding at the shelter is due to our people that are coming here to this country. OK, now I don’t want to sound like a bigot, but I’m laying it right where it is. We have people coming in here that don’t treat animals the way they should be treated. And they are letting them breed. They don’t care because they themselves don’t watch how much they populate. OK? And that’s one of the major problems. They toss off animals, they discard them. We have situations where they get tired of them, ‘Oh, we’ll just take them to the shelter. Oh They’re too old. They can’t play. We don’t want them any more.’ That’s what is really happening….

“Other cities have no-kill policies, and they’ve worked fine. They just won’t work in L.A., that I pretty much agree with, because of our inept system here and because of all the immigrants that we have here who don’t give a rat’s you-know-what about animals That’s the reason why we have a big problem here…”

Get past all the vitriol, and I don’t doubt there’s some truth here: Where there are more people, there will be more pets and pet-related problems. Likewise, many Third World countries, as a whole, don’t share our “enlightened” approach to animals — for better (they don’t deify their pets) and for worse (they do enjoy cock-fighting). Here, as with any number of social issues, when different cultures butt up against each other, there will be some friction.

But what I find particularly interesting about this angry rant is that, generally, we consider pro-animal rights to be a lefty position, and anti-immigration to be a righty one. Yet here the two converge — as they do, occasionally, among certain environmental and overpopulation types — in a shared sense of misanthropy.